A new leaf for British politics

Monday 5th September, 2022

The confirmation of Liz Truss as Conservative party leader today will have shocked no one who has glanced at a British newspaper in the last month. In every poll since 12th July she has held a comfortable lead over Rishi Sunak. Truss won the votes of 81,326 out of a possible electorate of 172,437. With just over 30,000 abstentions, she secured 57.4% of cast votes.

In the eye of the general public, Truss lagged a considerable distance behind Sunak in terms of favourability. This is not a good sign for those who long for a period of stability. Truss is the third Tory leader in a row to have gained office outside of a general election. Theresa May was elected unopposed in the 2016 leadership race, Boris Johnson succeeded her in similar circumstances in 2019 and now a third election in 6 years has now yielded Liz Truss. In the face of a weak opposition in the last general elections, it is no wonder the public are fed up.

It is likely to be two years until the next general election, where a Labour party showing signs of revival are ranking well in the polls. They will no doubt begin to look even more tempting at the ballot box if the new government cannot prove capable at handling the glut of problems it is now faced with. The electorate will have their day and it is now the duty of Liz Truss and her new government to make the Conservative party appealing again. It will have been 14 years by then since Labour was in power, but the late noughties are not a time that many will want to reminisce on.

Luckily for Truss, there are some fresh faces which she will no doubt have to make room for in her government to stave off unwelcome backbench criticism from the disruptive 2019 intake of MPs. That could go some way to rejuvenating the party and the voters’ opinion of it. Young MPs and fellow leadership contenders Kemi Badenoch, Tom Tugendhat and Penny Mordaunt could feature in ministerial roles as they have each proved very popular amongst the party membership and with fellow MPs. The public too, seemed to prefer them over the eventual final two candidates, Truss and Sunak.

Unfortunately, this new chapter will not be a good one for the following reasons:

1. The sheer scale of the issues that the country faces means that there will always be things missed. If you are reading this, you will know what those problems are so there is no point in listing them at length here, but the main ones are the cost of living, strikes, climate change and the Ukraine War. Naturally, the press will focus on those things. It will be for posterity to look back on the period and decide if it was a successful government or not.
2. There are still reportedly a whole host of allegations against numerous MPs, mainly sexual offences, that are being investigated and will be reported in the papers over the coming years. Sleaze scandals brought down John Major’s government after almost 18 years of Conservative rule. In this day and age, these allegations have a serious chance of upsetting the political system we have. It is difficult to see the public giving the same amount of support to any party if even a quarter of those implicated are found guilty.
3. There remains many a report into Boris Johnson to emerge from Westminster, including that from the privileges committee over the misleading of Parliament, his sources of funding for the decoration of 10 Downing Street and the peerage given to Evgeny Lebedev despite security concerns. Those three things which are yet to reach their conclusions will, together with the rest of his legacy, cast a long shadow over us for a long time to come.

The prospects are bleak when set out like this, but we must have hope. Democracy will always be the best possible system of government and there are increasingly louder shouts about change coming from all corners. If the state of affairs is to improve, we must all have optimism and the energy to match it. There are nuggets of hope to cling on to, and that is what we must do.